In case anyone else wants to try the cron thing, here’s what worked on Ubuntu. (Naturally you could also use a repeating timer. Here are acouple vibrating ones.)
First you want to choose a terminal editor if you haven’t already. nano is supposed to be good for beginners. Unfortunately, I wasted the time necessary to learn Vim. (Click-and-type editors beat Vim handily in the editing-speed trials I’ve performed on myself using part of Vim’s own tutorial document.) From the command line:
This should open file.html in Firefox every minute. Be sure to include a newline at the end of the file; that’s supposed to be important. Logging in and out has sometimes jiggled things in to action for me.
Of course, every minute is only good for testing purposes. This should do every fifteen minutes from 9 to 5 Monday through Friday:
I recommend you choose a different font color and background for each distinct message you want to periodically send yourself. This helps the messages function as separate stimuli, and you can stop reading them after a while.
I managed to do the equivalent of this on Windows XP. First, go to
Control Panel > Scheduled Tasks > Add Scheduled Task
A wizard comes up. Click Next, and in the next window select your browser and click Next. Enter a name for the task, select Every Day, and click Next. On the next page make sure the task is set to be performed daily starting from today and the current time, and hit Next. Enter your admin password on the next window and hit Next. On the last window, check the box by “Open advanced properties for this task when I click Finish” and click Finish.
On the window that comes up, there’s a “Run” field that has something like
E:\PROGRA~1\MOZILL~1\firefox.exe
in it (depending on what your browser is and where it’s installed). You need to append “file:///C:/path/to/file.html” to the end of it so that it looks like this:
Finally, go to the Schedule tab, click the “Advanced” button, and on the window that comes up check “Repeat” and have it repeat every 15 minutes (or however frequently you want it to repeat). Also set the Duration to 24 hours.
I use this page for the task, because it amuses me. It uses javascript to randomize the font and background colors, although it’s randomized presets instead of being totally random to ensure that the text is always readable.
Not much of an effect so far. The major flaw is that I disable the task whenever I want to do a non-procrastination task, which for me consists of studying math. The math textbooks I have are pdfs, and it’s irritating to have the procrastination page pop up when I’m not procrastinating. However, when my mind does wander while trying to study, I’ll open up a browser window and suddenly I’m procrastinating with no pop-ups to stop me.
A clear workaround would be to buy dead tree textbooks so that this doesn’t happen, but I don’t have the financial resources for that. Perhaps the solution is to resolve to re-enable the task whenever I open a window, but that’s a bit tedious. I may look into making a Firefox addon for this, so that it happens automatically whenever the browser is open. That’s likely the optimal solution (if it’s possible to do).
You could unplug your computer’s ethernet cable when you’re studying.
One thing to watch out for if you try this is getting in the habit of plugging it in real quick whenever you want to do something on the internet. You could mandate a one-minute delay before re-plugging or something like that.
In case anyone else wants to try the cron thing, here’s what worked on Ubuntu. (Naturally you could also use a repeating timer. Here are a couple vibrating ones.)
First you want to choose a terminal editor if you haven’t already. nano is supposed to be good for beginners. Unfortunately, I wasted the time necessary to learn Vim. (Click-and-type editors beat Vim handily in the editing-speed trials I’ve performed on myself using part of Vim’s own tutorial document.) From the command line:
Then edit your crontab:
And insert the following line:
This should open file.html in Firefox every minute. Be sure to include a newline at the end of the file; that’s supposed to be important. Logging in and out has sometimes jiggled things in to action for me.
Of course, every minute is only good for testing purposes. This should do every fifteen minutes from 9 to 5 Monday through Friday:
More docs here.
I recommend you choose a different font color and background for each distinct message you want to periodically send yourself. This helps the messages function as separate stimuli, and you can stop reading them after a while.
I managed to do the equivalent of this on Windows XP. First, go to
Control Panel > Scheduled Tasks > Add Scheduled Task
A wizard comes up. Click Next, and in the next window select your browser and click Next. Enter a name for the task, select Every Day, and click Next. On the next page make sure the task is set to be performed daily starting from today and the current time, and hit Next. Enter your admin password on the next window and hit Next. On the last window, check the box by “Open advanced properties for this task when I click Finish” and click Finish.
On the window that comes up, there’s a “Run” field that has something like
E:\PROGRA~1\MOZILL~1\firefox.exe
in it (depending on what your browser is and where it’s installed). You need to append “file:///C:/path/to/file.html” to the end of it so that it looks like this:
E:\PROGRA~1\MOZILL~1\firefox.exe file:///C:/path/to/file.html
Finally, go to the Schedule tab, click the “Advanced” button, and on the window that comes up check “Repeat” and have it repeat every 15 minutes (or however frequently you want it to repeat). Also set the Duration to 24 hours.
I use this page for the task, because it amuses me. It uses javascript to randomize the font and background colors, although it’s randomized presets instead of being totally random to ensure that the text is always readable.
If you don’t mind sharing, how has this been going for you?
(I’m really interested to hear how well my life hacks work for other people.)
Not much of an effect so far. The major flaw is that I disable the task whenever I want to do a non-procrastination task, which for me consists of studying math. The math textbooks I have are pdfs, and it’s irritating to have the procrastination page pop up when I’m not procrastinating. However, when my mind does wander while trying to study, I’ll open up a browser window and suddenly I’m procrastinating with no pop-ups to stop me.
A clear workaround would be to buy dead tree textbooks so that this doesn’t happen, but I don’t have the financial resources for that. Perhaps the solution is to resolve to re-enable the task whenever I open a window, but that’s a bit tedious. I may look into making a Firefox addon for this, so that it happens automatically whenever the browser is open. That’s likely the optimal solution (if it’s possible to do).
You could unplug your computer’s ethernet cable when you’re studying.
One thing to watch out for if you try this is getting in the habit of plugging it in real quick whenever you want to do something on the internet. You could mandate a one-minute delay before re-plugging or something like that.